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Nintendo definitely has a different business strategy than Sony or Microsoft. Anyway—the cost of esoteric / more custom hardware got higher, that’s why the console manufacturers moved away from it. It would make sense to shove a lot of custom hardware in your 3D video game console in the mid-1990s, because there is simply no other way to do good real-time 3D, and you have SGI who’s willing to sell you chip designs. As time went on, the approach of shoving big custom ASICs in your console starts to look worse and worse. Most of the CPU vendors that previously sold you all sorts of architectures like 68K, MIPS, POWER, Cell, etc. stop trying to compete with x86 hegemony. Meanwhile, you’re making life more difficult for console developers, because these custom designs are just so different from everything else on the market. So you get the PS3, which is expensive to manufacture, and requires a lot of specialized work to program the SPEs (painful for developers). That’s two generations after the N64, and the world has changed. I would also be less likely to call the Gamecube/Wii architecture exotic, at least compared to the PS3. |